The Murky World of 3D Benchmarking

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A few years ago, a benchmark developer working for Ziff-Davis’ benchmark operations group lamented, “In a few years, we won’t be able to reliably or repeatably benchmark anything due to the dynamic optimizations of the OS, drivers and apps.” It would appear that this prediction is being borne out today. And ironically, it’s not entirely a bad thing for consumers.

Giving developers a programmable 3D pipeline that allows them to create customized code paths for different GPUs means that gamers living at different ends of the 3D food-chain will hopefully all be able to have at least a good (if not great) gaming experience. The problem is how to evaluate 3D performance in an “apples to apples” manner, and give consumers a good idea of what kind of performance they can reasonably expect from a given piece of hardware.

As we move further into the world of the programmable 3D pipeline and vertex/pixel shaders, this problem will persist and make level performance comparisons increasingly difficult. Is there an easy answer to solve this problem? Not really. But there are things that can be done to give consumers the information they need to make an informed buying decision.

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